The Fireman by Joe Hill Published by William Morrow on May 17th 2016
Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
Pages: 752
Format: eBook, Kindle Book, Audiobook
Source: Audible, Amazon Kindle
From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.
The fireman is coming. Stay cool.
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.
Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.
In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.
The Fireman is one of the best books I read in 2016. This was a really good post-apocalyptic book. I am not usually into post-apocalyptic but I am a fan of Joe Hill. So this was how I dived into this book. I started listening to the audiobook first. As I listened I discovered I have dived into such a good book that I got the kindle book too to switch between reading and listening.
The book opens with a breath taking seen. A man burns to death. Harper, a school nurse, doesn’t understand what is going on at first. Later, we discover that a strange disease is invading the country. A disease that threatens the mankind. Once people get infected they can burn to death anywhere and at any time. A ‘dragon scale’ starts to show on their skin. This is the sign of the disease. And it’s like a death sentence that can be executed any time. From this point forward, people become enemies. Actually, I won’t spoil the story line as this is a book you have to read yourself.
The Fireman book is so powerful and in more than one dimension. As I said, people who might had once been lovers, families or friends are now enemies. We realize two parties, the healthy and the infected. And though the healthy are so liable to becoming infected at any time, they fight against the infected as though they are themselves the disease. It feels to me like their hatred and fear of the disease had materialized into this hatred towards their own people who happened to get infected before them. From my point of view, this was a very thought provoking concept. Just imagine in our real life how people can turn against each other for such reason.
Another thought provoking concept was what I think of as “the group behavior”. People in charge used both, the fear and the tendency to group behavior, to lead people in this book as if they were leading a herd. They initiated the thoughts and concepts that served them best and built a major belief in the group mind of their people that this was the salvation. We witness how this behavior is initiated then how it grows till it becomes a well-established way of thinking and those who dared defy it would face the worst they could imagine.
Needless to say, the writing style was amazing. Joe Hill is a very talented writer. His use of words and style of storytelling is more than amazing. But of course, it takes a very good writer to write a book that can be that long and still that amazing.
The Fireman is a very compelling book. It’s one of the books that I will dwell on for a long time.
About Joe Hill
Joseph Hillstrom King (born 1972) is an American writer of fiction and comic books, writing under the pen name of Joe Hill.
As of 2016 he has published four novels, a collection of short stories, a six-volume graphic novel series, and more. His most recent novel, The Fireman, debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list, and his novel Horns was made into a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe.
Hill is the the second child of authors Stephen King and Tabitha King. His younger brother Owen King is also a writer. Joe has three children.
Hill chose to use an abbreviated form of his given name (a reference to executed labor leader Joe Hill, for whom he was named) in 1997, out of a desire to succeed based solely on his own merits instead of as the son of Stephen King. After achieving a degree of independent success, Hill publicly confirmed his identity in 2007 after an article the previous year in Variety broke his cover (although online speculation about Hill’s family background had been appearing since 2005).